Griefers are here...in droves!

I quit playing Halo & Counter Strike because of griefing...now Guild Wars might make the list as well. I've played for a year now (a bit over really...with BWEs). Loved the game, the new discoveries and PvE....finished the story a couple times (ok 6) and thought maybe PvP might be fun, and it was for awhile. I can see how Factions will renew my interest some....but I'm going back to PvE. Hands down, It's the better game...I can run with henchies and not worry about the absolute crap PvP holds.

The last 3 weeks I've kept track of "leavers" and can honestly say....70% premature leaving is akin to griefing, but the 10% that leave before the fight is really rediculous. Today, a player found it fun to sacrifice himself to death with a W/N build and beg for res, someone I told "well done" after ganking me called me a c*nt and on three seperate occasions, I found myself in the middle of battle using res and having the rezzed player leave immidiatley after I burned my sig. Some of this carries over to team areanas as well as random.

On top of all this, my guild is oddly lacking active members....carefully screened folks who have'nt played for 2 weeks to over a month...Every person who has been promoted to officer has cut and run after getting what they want out of it.

The towns and outposts are full of 13-year-old Hitler Youth wanna-bees throwing racist crap all over the place that is so badly misspelled you can't filter it even if you were inclined to try.

All the things I hate about other online games is here and sadly, it's here to stay...I know "bitch, bitch, bitch...."

Most of the time I shrug it off or make fun of the fools, but I had absolutely no fun at all for the first time ever....suggestions?

Yeah I tend to agree, compared to when I started playing (9 monthes ago) the quality of players in Randoms and Towns/outposts has steadily decreased.

I think it is largely due to the fact that Guild Wars is not a "lengthy" mmorpg by any stretch of the word, some may even argue that it's not an rpg at all. So because of this a large number of players have moved on because there wasn't much less for them to do. And it tends to be only the complete noobs and the 100% hardcore players that remain.

And I'm making a big generalization here, but I've noticed that slowly but surely a vast mahority of my old friends have left and moved. And as I said before this can almost entirely be linked to the fact that Guild Wars is a pretty short game compared to others, hell you can grind a character through it in a couple of days if you wanted.

So PvP's bad because you lack the friends required to field an 8 man team? Here's a clue: Nobody takes the arenas seriously. There's no reason to either. There's no e-peen in winning arena matches, there's no in-game rewards and there's no ladder.

If you're going to claim PvP to be bad, atleast play the real thing first. If you're here to moan about the arenas, well then you're not exactly the first person here to find it pathetic.

Great, another one of those "I don't care about something so no one should care about it" posts.

-Some people don't want to play 8 vs. 8. Some people want to log on for half an hour and have a quick fix.

-What has "taking the arenas seriously" got to do with anything the OP said? And anyway, it's a damn game. What's to take seriously about any part of it? Certainly not the more 'leet' PvP types.

-Why would you assume anyone would care about rewards and ladders? In a good game, playing it should be reward enough.

-Ooh, so 4 vs. 4 PvP isn't the real thing. Cripes, what was I thinking, so everytime I played that I played along and versus NPCs?

What we're dealing with here is someone who's complaining over PvP, claiming PvE to be the better game, when all he's doing is playing random and team arenas, where your common opponent is a mesmer casting backfire on your warriors and empathy on your eles. Ontop of scrubs, you have those not playing to win (aka griefers), who are having fun by saccing themselves for a day, or leaving matches they know they wont win (usually because of lack of monks). These are the people the OP's complaining about, and these people are doing these things because there's no reason not to. They're not losing anything by leaving (usually just saving time), and they're not gaining anything by staying. Your "It's a game so you should have fun no matter what you're doing" logic is unfit in this situation, since most people in RA/TA would most likely rather be doing other things in the game, such as HA/GvG, however most of these people are either just waiting for enough of their friends to come online, or they don't have a team to join. Since RA/TA has been turned into a mass waiting room and a slow but steady faction farm, there's no reason at all to consider this "true PvP". True PvP is true competition. True competition is not a mending warrior with bonetti's + glad's defense.

Well shoot, you just basically reiterated the OP's problem and you seem to find it the most natural thing in the world. No wonder this game has a serious problem in the casual PvP area.

Then why the hell don't they just bugger the hell off and let people (like myself) who are playing 4x4 because they like playing that format get on with it without turning it into a cesspool of bad sportsmanship?

Like I said, you just reiterated the problem. Rationalizing it doesn't make it go away or any less annoying.

It got a lot worse after the PvP weekend. I have a pet theory what happened, but wont go in to that here. Anyway, clearly a lot of buttmunches decided that farming faction in random arena was the thing to do.
That's the leavers; they wont play unless the team has their ideal composition.

Then there's the "it's funny to annoy other players" guys, like your saccing necro & the c*nt caller. IMO that's the guys who'll explain to you that only HoH and GvG is real PvP, everything else is just irrelevant, and hence those doing anything else deserve to be griefed. Shinsei above pretty much embodies this view.

Out of personal curiosity, do you play on the EU servers?

TwinRaven I agree with you for the most part. I've been playing since the release and it does seem like there are more griefers than before. I attribute it to the common "I pWnZ012 J00" attitude.

Before GW I played mostly FPS games so making the switch was a breath of fresh air. Alot of my friends who used to play FPS games like CS, RVS, Quake, etc made the switch to GW. I hate to admit it but they carried over the same attitude from those games. They hate to lose, they hate to die. I personally like the change.. it's great to know that there is no such thing as a guaranteed win due to counter builds. It's unfortunate that some can't deal with that fact.

Here are my suggestions:
1. If you must play in RA turn off local chat and maybe even team chat. I usually turn it back on after a few wins because by that point everyone is usually a little more outgoing and amiable.

2. Try playing more in TA. You don't have to assemble your own team and can randomly join one. It sometimes takes awhile but more often than not you'll join up with a guild group or at least players who are in it for the same reason you're playing. I noticed a significantly less amount of people leaving during a match in TA when compared to RA.

3. I'm not sure how it is now since the update, but before I used to always play in the TA International districts. It was a whole lot easier finding a group with a good attitude than my home district.

4. Join a guild that can help you achieve your goals in PVE and PVP. Just recently my friend joined XoO (xen of onslaught) and has told me great things about them... friendly.. good attitudes.. always something to do.. etc.

5. Most importantly just remember it's a game and have fun! Don't take things too personally. Elitism comes with the territory of any competitive gaming activity, heck you even see it on these boards ^. Don't let it get to you. There will always be those who need a self-esteem boost by "owning" people or need to express their superiority.... just be thankful you're not one of them.

Cheers.

Wonder if they realise they can get faction easier by doing Zaishen Challenge...?

Of course not, Jakerius, that's fighting AI's. You can't get faction fighting AI's. /sarcasm

Well, on the point of griefers, you could always make an anti griefer build. Granted, it doesn't help with the massochistic self-sacers, but you could always screenshot and report them. And definetly do that to the c*nt callers, they need a swift kick off the interwebs.

As for myself, I'm in the same boat. I used to have lots of people on that I could play PvP with. Now.... no one. I'm seriously alone. But, I just got tired of PvP and moved back to PvE.... to see that the jerks followed me. Now, I just don't care. If they start being stupid, I just leave. There's no sense in wasting my time, effort, or hair on people who have nothing better to do than ruin my game.

This is a lot more fun when you're playing a healer, btw. ^^

If this was limited to pvp arenas I would say who cares...I don't & won't go near them because of griefers.

Unfortunately, this is not the case...It seems like you cannot go into a town anywhere without people swearing & making nasty remarks. Also, the amount of sexual harrasment going on is incredible.

I have asked Anet again & again for a answer as to their forward policy on this, but they just seem to be ignoring it as an issue.

I fully expect randoms & general town areas to be as bad as Battle.net was before the year is out...

I tend to only play within my Guild now because of this. It is also making the recruitment of new players harder because most people don't want the abuse when looking.

I read the OP's thread several times and that is not what I saw. He is complaining about griefers, and stated he prefers PvE. Please get off your elite PvP horse and try to understand what others are saying.

It sounds like youre trying to say that since RA/TA is lightwieght it doesn't matter how you behave. Its just a prime example of the horrible behavior of those whose pvp, including the little pvp ghetto callled HA. Those very idiots the OP are describing will one day be in GvG/HA and still be acting like morons. Theres no defense to this crap. Also, you don't define PvP so don't even try, because your explanations are pathetic. Open your elitest mind and try to actually communicate when you post, instead of spouting your stale canned snobbish rheteric.

Well said.

Unfortunately you will always have elitist players who believe themselves the pinnacle of everything...

Fortunately we can usually trounce them in gvg whenever they to allow us to compete against them...Lmao

*Sigh*

I have to admit...I can't agree with you more.

like i said in my other posts, the only way to fix this problem is to get anet to create a "punch player" function. when a player's acting like a jackrear, have a wooden fist fly out of the moniter to smack him square in the face. anything short of that will never solve the problem.

To the tune of "Hey, GW is just a game", I would have stopped spending just about every night playing this game if I limited myself only to playing with henchies or playing with parties of human players unknown to me. Henchies are predictable and don't leave or gripe, but are boring. And there are too many human players with less than admirable gaming behavior.

But what brings me back every night, and really, this is the only reason, is that I now have accumulated a rather nice friends group, and there always seems to be enough for a FOW or UW or SF party whenever I log on. We joke, we play well as a team, we just have a good time.

Once in a while we meet someone knew who we like very much and who plays this game sort of in our style, and they then get added to our group of playing friends. Often we meet a player who we simply do not wish to party with again.

And so it goes. If my current friends stop playing GW, so will I, or at least I will log on only once in a while.

I have noticed after Christmas alot of thepeopel I call "Runescape Style" people have started showing up.

Runescape is a game you have to keep chat turned off in or you'll dig your eyes out.

They are filling up random Guild Wars districts now >_<

Here's a clue: even in GvG and HA it is terribly hard to find teams or guilds that aren't jerks, Anarcists, Skin Heads, ect.

I've even seen guilds that have members that leave when they start to lose (without being told by their captain to do so).

And everyone in HA leaves when they start to lose, even if their group took 3 hours to put together.

Runescape = Free game

Guild Wars = No monthly fee

They probably are from Runescape Alot of people will play games just becuase they can afford them. Others, will only play games becuase they aren't aloud to buy M rated ones.

I've seen so many griefers in the startegy game Warcraft III who later admit that they 'hate Warcraft and only play it becuase its T rated and doesn't have blood'.

I'm not sure of the reason, but this does seem to be a much larger problem of late. I'm not a hardcore PvP player, but I usually like to spend a little time in the arena's from time to time. I don't like playing HA because getting into a PUG is ridiculous and my Guild doesn't do much HA/GvG (although we are starting to GvG more). So I play in RA/TA and it is no fun to have people leave if they die, or leave before the match starts, or use a bot to farm faction by just getting into a group and not doing anything, or just shouting out foul language at the other team even though they have done nothing as the match has not even started yet. For myself I always stay through the entire match regardless of how many people leave (even if I'm the only person) and I'll play my heart out. It sucks but there is not much we can do other than say "GG" at the end of the match and report the people that are abusive (which I SS and take time out of my playing to do).